Alright, what smart Monster Cable employee decided to initiate a fight with a small company headed by a skilled lawyer?

Monster Cable, known for its pricey boutique cables, which it markets to the audiophile community is no stranger to controversy. The cable company markets the cables as having superior quality sound, but according to one infamous study "audio aficionados" supposedly were unable to tell the difference in sound between short monster cables and a short metal coat hanger forged into a crude connecter.

While its merits are debatable, one hard fact is that Monster Cable has a penchant for agressive litigation. It has sent letters accusing everyone from Monster Energy Drinks to Monsters Inc., the Disney/Pixar movie, of trademark infringement. However, some its legal assaults are industry specific as well. However, it appears it may have finally met its match in one small company, Blue Jeans Cable.

He sent a whopper of a response back to Monster Cable, dripping in detail, sarcasm, and legitimate demands that is sure to have Monster Cable's legal team sweating.

Denke states:

Let me begin by stating, without equivocation, that I have no
interest whatsoever in infringing upon any intellectual property
belonging to Monster Cable. Indeed, the less my customers think my
products resemble Monster's, in form or in function, the better ... If
there is more than one such connector design in actual use by Monster
Cable as to which appropriation of trade dress is alleged, of course, I
will require this information for each and every such design. On the
basis of what I have seen, both in the USPTO documents you have sent
and the actual appearance of Monster Cable connectors which I have
observed in use in commerce, it does not appear to me that Monster
Cable is in a position to advance a nonfrivolous claim for infringement
of these marks.
....I will also point out to you that if
you do choose to undertake litigation, your "upside" is tremendously
limited. If you somehow managed, despite
the formidable obstacles in your way, to obtain a finding of infringement, and
if you were successful at recovering a large licensing fee--say, ten cents per
connector--as the measure of damages, your recovery to date would not reach
four figures. On the downside, I will
advance defenses which, if successful, will substantially undermine your future
efforts to use these patents and marks to threaten others with these types of
actions; as you are of course aware, it is easier today for your competitors to
use collateral estoppel offensively than it ever has been before. Also, there is little doubt that making
baseless claims of trade dress infringement and design patent infringement is
an improper business tactic, which can give rise to unfair competition claims,
and for a company of Monster's size, potential antitrust violations with treble
damages and attorneys' fees.

Nonetheless it would be unsurprising to see a lesser small-company bow down and kowtow to Monster Cable, fearful of the larger company's resources. However, like any bully it appears Monster Cable has finally met its match.

I'm no lawyer, and this is not a legal opinion, Monster Cable could turn out to have legitimate gripes, but as I said their claims seem pretty tenuous and reek of just another chapter in this era of junk litigation.

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And I forgot to say, I do see your point about digital signals.With analog signals, you could always find some loon that would want an ever clearer, pure and accurate signal, no matter how good it was already. There is just no such thing as 1:1 match in the analog world.But with digital signals, there is no difference between a "perfect" cable and just a "good" cable - as long as there aren't any blatantly obvious flaws in it, the received data is 1:1 identical.